Web X-Ray: Developing and Adopting Web Best Practices in Enterprises

Reinaldo Ferreira

The adoption of Semantic Web technologies constitutes a promising approach to data structuring and integration, both for public and private usage. While these technologies have been around for some time, their adoption is behind overall expectations, particularly in the case of Enterprises. Having that in mind, we developed a Semantic Web Implementation Model that measures and facilitates the implementation of the technology. The advantages of using the model proposed are two-fold: the model serves as a guide for driving the implementation of the Semantic Web as well as it helps to evaluate the impact of the introduction of the technology.
The model was adopted by 19 enterprises in an Action Research intervention of one year with promising results: according to the model’s scale, in average, all enterprises evolved from a 6% evaluation to 46% during that period. Furthermore, practical implementation recommendations, a typical consulting tool, were developed and adopted during the project by all enterprises, providing important guidelines for the identification of a development path that may be adopted on a larger scale.
Meanwhile, the project also outlined that most enterprises were interested in an even broader scope of the Implementation Model and the ambition of a “All Web Technologies” approach arose. One model that could embrace the observable overlapping of different Web generations, namely the Web of Documents, the Social Web, the Web of Data and, ultimately, the Web of Context. One model that could combine the evaluation and guidance for all enterprises to follow. That’s the goal of the undergoing “Project Web X-ray” that aims to involve 200 enterprises in the adoption of best practices that may lead to their business development based on Web technologies.
This paper presents a case of how Action Research promoted the simultaneous advancement of academic research and enterprise development and introduces the framework and opportunities related to Web Science and how the different and overlapping Web generations offer a relevant opportunity for enterprise development. It also discusses the learnings from bringing academic research to the enterprises and how it leads to further development of both the research and the utility of the results. Finally, it introduces the fundamentals for a new and broader Web Technology Implementation Model that may become a reference for Enterprise adoption.

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